READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  The author’s gift for memorable openings is recalled in ‘The Museum of Innocence”, where the two lovers of the story are first introduced in the middle of the act of lovemaking, an extended erotic description that infuses the reader’s thoughts for the rest of the novel, in the expectation of when will this happen again.   ‘My Name is Red’ employs an equally remarkable device to take hold of the reader’s attention and keep it there: the reader listens to a story told by a dead person. And not just any dead person, but a fresh corpse, the murdered man at the centre of the story, speaking now from where his body has been thrown at the bottom of a well.   The whole novel is spoken in the voices of different characters, living and dead, as well as unexpected voices like a dog, or a tree in a picture-book. Such variety of voices keeps the reader alert to what might happen next, while enabling a decameron of perspectives about the late 16 th century world of Constantinopl...

    Kerry Greenwood’s knowledge of church ways and the Anglican Province of Victoria a century ago are marvellously, if quirkily at times, on show in her posthumously published Phryne Fisher mystery, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. The stylish socialite detective has been invited by her old friend Lionel Watkins to attend his installation as Bishop of Bendigo. For this reason, we learn from Miss Fisher that “I’m not much of a believer myself, but I was brought up in the Church of England. It is the religion of the Great Compromise. It is above all a creed founded on the principle that murdering each other on points of doctrine is something that only foreigners do.” This confession of faith, if you will, is basis for her opinion, shared with the investigating constabulary, that “every church has its awkward moments, but clergymen and organists don’t go around killing each other because they have guilty secrets.” She works by her own process of elimination, nearly always leaving offi...

  Article written by Philip Harvey for the Newsletter of the Community of the Holy Name   Irish historian Eamon Duffy, in ‘A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation’ (Bloomsbury, 2021, page 83) writes that “There are more than 350 different translations of the Bible into English, more than into any other language. And if we count English versions of the New Testament, or of individual books or clusters of books such as the Psalms or the Gospels, the number of different English Bible translations runs into thousands.” Note the quiet sub-clause “more than into any other language”, which only hints at the scale of translations into those “other” languages. Wikipedia, quoting Wycliffe Bible Translators, summons the numbers: “The full Bible has been translated into 704 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,551 languages and Bible portions or stories into 1,160 other languages. Thus at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,41...

    At this year’s St Peter’s Book Fair in September, in Melbourne, amidst a table of turned-up spines: one small tattered green book, art nouveau decorations in gold on cover.   Title page: ‘The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest : Being a Translation of Tsure-Zure Gusa by William N. Porter’, with an Introduction by Sanki Ichikawa. (London : Humphrey Milford, 1914)   Only on page 4 of the Introduction, hidden in a paragraph, is the actual name of the author disclosed, “a fourteenth-century priest named Kenko, who lived the life of a recluse, without being able entirely to forgo the passions and desires of this world.” Hidden in his own book.   Why William N. Porter prints his name and the name of Sanki Ichikawa on the title page, but not the name of Urabe Kenko (1283-1350), also known as Yoshida Kenko, or simply Kenko, is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps short essays on the conjectures are in order. Publishing sales. English manners. Self-importerance. The ...

  Report on a lecture given at Trinity College, Parkville on the 12 th of August and reflections from Philip Harvey, for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne   Last Tuesday Susan Bell, Bishop of Niagara, gave the Barry Marshall Lecture in Melbourne on the priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Priest and poet are roles inextricably bound together in the person of Herbert, something she painfully (in the early modern sense of ‘going to pains’) described. She remarked that “all his writing is about vocation  to Christianity.”   Son of one of the leading families of the realm, u niversity orator, courtier and diplomat, he was “a man on the way up when it all came to a  screeching halt.” Herbert decided to enter holy orders, possibly due to health. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, went to work in the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where presently he died, probably of consumption. His poetry, Bishop Bell called it “winsome”...

    ‘Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, published by Allen Lane, 2024. This review first appeared in the patronal issue of The Parish Paper at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, June 2025.   Anyone familiar with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s breadth and depth of research and his powers of synthesis is inspired anew by his latest big-picture history of Christianity. His confessed purpose is to unsettle settled ideas. Indeed, when it comes to his chosen subject of sex, the reader must reconsider all manner of lifetime assumptions, left wondering what conclusions can be drawn.   Just two assumptions are enough for starters. 1.      There have always been church weddings. This assumption is flatly disproven by MacCulloch. The church in early centuries had remarkably little to do with the ceremonies of marriage, a fact supported by a complete lack of any liturgical evidence. Blessings of marriag...